Love it or?

In the digital world we've chips with everything from the telly to the 'phone. And we love it. But their ubiquity means that when the chips are down, we're basically stuffed. Life grinds to an inelegant halt and we crash about in a temper because nothing works. It's late on a Thursday, the day of the scatty weekly column. It’s late in the week, the week of the scatty month of May already. I cannot concentrate, I cannot write and I definitely cannot think. The chip-ridden stress of everything is overwhelming. The worst of it is that as I see the whelm approaching, I'm urging it to come on faster. And it's all because of evil-minded chips creating doom out of what should just be inconvenience.

It's really nothing new, that sense of drowning in the endless trivia of daily life even when the chips are all working just fine. People send snotty emails, people get stuck up their own noses and bludgeon you with their self-importance, their total focus on themselves and their precious individuality. No patience at all today for that individual identity crap or any of the gender toejam. The usual sense of drowning's been ramped up beyond eleven because of a complete hardware fail on my laptop. Chips overboard and into the deepening whelm. The laptop's dead. Black. Silent. It's just so much metal and wire and weldings and pointless ex-chips. Chips for everything until it is chips for nothing, zombied chips, redundant and fit only for recycling.

Chips are our lives now and when a chip stops being a chip and opts instead for junk status everything stops. You try all the usual tricks and then the clever combinations on the keyboard. You shine a light into the blank screen in the hope that it's a backlighting problem. You give the thing a slap and thump it on the desk. You shout at it and shake it. You put down the brick before it all gets out of hand. Trying to be calm you borrow a device or use a fossil from ten years ago in search online of ultimately useless hints for fixing it. Eventually you take it to someone else in the pathetic hope that they might have a touch more magic in their fingers than you have in yours. But they haven't. Hardware fail. Lights out laptop.

And then there was the passport drama. On a recent trip to Berlin where we had cheese and cracker suppers far too often, I was told at checkin in London that I couldn't travel because my passport is out of date. When pointing out that it was issued in July and expires in September, the gentle but none too sharp lady said that it was only valid if the passport was dated within less than ten years of issue. A few minutes of careful counting on fingers, mine and hers, and I was allowed to pass. Fine. Then the next EasyJet numpty said the same thing, except this time her boss was on hand to explain the counting thing. One to ten, really shouldn't be that much of a challenge.

Wisely, I thought, I applied online for a new passport to be ready in time for the next trip. Paris beckoning and not to be denied. Fine again. Appointment to confirm who I am, but to collect the passport? No. Why would it be that simple? Another kind lady, this time rather more numerate explained that the passport would be with me on the May bank holiday Monday, except that it wouldn't because that was a holiday so it would arrive by the Tuesday. The Tuesday was when a EuroStar seat with my name on it was waiting at some surely illegal hour of the morning. What? Pay even more extra for one day service? Nope. Cancel the original application and make a new one with one day service? That takes a week, so absolutely nope. Forget about the whole application and take a chance? She said I could do that but the new application renders the old passport invalid. You have until Saturday to receive it she sweetly said before taking up the scissors and rendering my battered history invalid with a vicious snip. Amazingly the new passport arrived yesterday, crispy, still and empty. I have been told that you can put your own stamps in a passport, so might just do that to annoy them all. I have some stamps of hearts and horses and ancient date stamps to make them look important and official.

That day, the day of the passport denial, was the day when the laptop expired. I've ordered a new MacBook Air, or is it Book Air or Mac Air? No clue but it is on its way, sadly not to be here for a couple of weeks. In the meantime I am wrestling with the fossil-top from 2010 and cadging a lend from Paul. It's peak bee season so I have a reasonable chance of getting away with the cadging for a little while. That anything at all has been retrievable from the back-up drive is remarkable, that I can access any online accounts at all is equally so. We should all love what the digital world can deliver to us, but equally it's not surprising that love can turn to hate with such alacrity.